French concert programme — Lalo, Franck, Fauré & others — Concert Programmes

Édouard Lalo (1823-1892)

Guitare (1856 rev 1885)

Puis’qu’ici-bas (1856 rev1885)

Oh Quand je dors (1856 rev1885)

Dieu qui sourit (1856 rev1885)

César Franck (1822-1890)

S’il est un charmant gazon (1857)

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)

Le papillon et la fleur (1861)

Richard Wagner (1818-1883)

L’attente (1839)

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)

La Captive (1832)

Georges Bizet (1838-1875)

Guitare (1866)

Les Adieux de l’Hôtesse arabe (1866)

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

Les nuits de juin (1927)

L’enfance (1927)

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)

Soirée en mer (1862)

À quoi bon entendre (1869)

La coccinelle (1868)

Si vous n’avez rien à me dire (1870)

Maude Valerie White (1855-1937)

Chantez, chantez jeune inspirée (c1881)

Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

Enfant, si j’étais Roi (1844 rev 1859)

Comment, disaient-ils (1842 rev 1849)

O quand je dors (1842 rev 1849)

The Poet: Victor Hugo (1802-1885) and his composers

Victor Hugo loved music and understood it. “Music,” he observed, “expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.” More poetically, impressionistically even, he wrote, “Music is the vapour of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what fluid is to liquid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves.” He admired Beethoven as “the greatest thinker” in music and was fond of Weber’s operas and Schubert’s Lieder. He did not, on the other hand, like hearing his own verse set to music - which was particularly unfortunate in his case. Hugo has inspired more music than any other French poet, including hundreds of songs, dozens of operas and ballets, several symphonic poems and overtures, countless items of incidental and film music (not to mention “Les Mis”). Since most of the songs were written in his lifetime, many of them by composers he knew as friends, his political exile in the Channel Islands must have been welcome at least in that it spared him seventeen years of having to listen to them.

Although the production of Hugo songs did not slow down during the Second Empire, when he was in acute disfavour with Louis Napoleon and his government, most composers avoided the political and philosophical verse he wrote after the coup d’état of 1851. Even after he was restored to glory in 1870 they preferred the fresh romanticism of the earlier collections, Odes et Ballades (1826), Les Orientales (1829), Les Feuilles d’automne (1831), Les Chants du crépuscule (1835) and Les Rayons et les Ombres (1840). Song production did begin to dwindle in the late 1870s, however, and after the poet’s death only a few old faithfuls like Massenet and Saint-Saëns continued to set more than just the occasional poem. Apart from Fauré, who was much taken by Hugo in the early years of his career, the great masters of the mélodie (Duparc, Chausson, Debussy, Ravel) had little or nothing to do with him. The reaction against romanticism was bound to come and the emergence of new poetic voices, Baudelaire and Verlaine above all, created (as Hugo said of Baudelaire) “a new frisson” and inspired a new kind of music.

The relatively small amount of Hugo music written in the twentieth century faithfully reflects the steep decline in the appeal of a writer who was so adored in his lifetime. Perhaps the best way of renewing contact with his poetry in his bicentenary year is by way of the songs he inspired, whether he liked them or not.

The Songs

Édouard Lalo was not the first composer to set a poem by Victor Hugo. That distinction should probably go to Ferdinand Hérold (of Zampa fame) who wrote a patriotic chorus on Hymne au morts de juillet in 1831. Then there was Berlioz in 1832, followed at some distance by Wagner, Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Franck and Gounod. Lalo was, however, the first composer to devote a whole set of songs to France’s leading poet of the day - the 6 mélodies avec accompagnement de piano, poésie de Victor Hugo published under that title in Paris in 1856.

Lalo revised his Hugo settings in 1885 but (except for one of the two songs not included in today’s programme) the second versions are not very different from the first and give a true idea of how innovative they were in 1856. While they are still strophic in form, they are true mélodies rather than romances in that the piano part is not just an accompaniment but is intimately involved in the expression. Guitare (Hugo called the poem Autre Guitare to distinguish it from a Guitare also included in Les Rayons et les Ombres) cannot compete with Bizet’s later setting in terms of charm and local colour but, in its left-hand guitar sounds, it has more of Spain in it than an earlier version by the 16-year-old Saint-Saëns and, thanks partly to its melodious piano part, more textural interest than either. Puis’qu’ici-bas (from Les voix intérieures), another favourite with composers, is set here with a sophisticated harmonic subtlety as it wavers between minor and major and finally, and sweetly, chooses the latter.

The piano part of Oh Quand je dors is so elaborate in comparison with the others that one wonders whether Lalo had seen Liszt’s 1842 setting of the same words (his much simplified revision had not been published at this point). Certainly, it is the most ambitious of Lalo’s Hugo songs, not exactly through-composed but, with its striking change of harmony for the second stanza and its varied piano figuration, not just unthinkingly strophic either. Dieu qui sourit (also from Les Rayons et les Ombres) is contrastingly straightforward and, not least because of its dashing piano part, irresistible in its momentum.

César Franck preferred sacred texts to romantic poetry. Among his less than twenty secular songs there are, however, five Hugo settings, including two versions of S’il est un charmant gazon (from Chants du Crépuscule) dating from 1855 and 1857 respectively. Although there is much competition here - including examples by Liszt, a teenage effort by Fauré (under the title Rêve d’amour) and a mature one by Saint-Saëns - Franck’s is as charmingly melodious as any of them and more affectionate than most. Fauré’s Rêve d’amour and Le Papillon et la fleur (also from Chants du Crépuscule) are among his earliest Hugo settings. Of the two, although it was written a year earlier “in the school refectory among the smells from the kitchen,” Le Papillon et la fleur is the more entertaining in its waltz-time tunefulness and its delicately flighty, even fragrant piano part.

Hugo’s appeal as a prophet of romanticism was by no means restricted to his compatriots. One of the first composers to realize his musical potential was none other than Richard Wagner, who set L’Attente from Les orientales in Paris in 1839 and sketched two others (Extase and La tombe dit à la rose) from the same collection at about the same time. L’Attente - which Saint-Saëns was to set rather more thoughtfully sixteen years later but not, surely, without a memory of Wagner’s ostinato piano rhythms and robust left-hand - is all raw energy. Also from Les Orientales, La Captive drew Berlioz’s attention as early as 1832, quite by chance when a book fell open at the appropriate page. He retained his interest in it for sixteen years, during which time he wrote the original voice and piano version, added a cello obbligato, orchestrated it and then, in 1848, completed a second and longer orchestral version. If his fascination for this particular poem - which, though exquisitely evocative, is faintly comic in its equation of slavery on the one hand and nice weather on the other - is a little difficult to understand, the lyrical inspiration of the song is indisputable.

One of the most seductive of all settings from Les Orientales must be Bizet’s Les Adieux de l’Hôtesse arabe, which is even more picturesque in its local colouring than his version of Autre Guitare. Written in 1866, the same year as Guitare, it is rare among settings of its kind and of its time in that the exoticism of the verse is reflected not only in the piano part and the melodic line but also in a voluptuous use of the voice: the initially modest “hôtesse” of the title becomes a provocative Arabian Carmen before she floats away at the end.

Although the production of Hugo songs declined significantly after the poet’s death, composers have continued to make fruitful discoveries among those not so slim volumes - not least Reynaldo Hahn whose first Hugo setting, Si mes vers avaient des ailes, written in 1888 at the age of thirteen, set him up for life. Britten was just a year older than that when

he wrote his Quatre Chansons Françaises as a wedding present for his parents. Never performed in his lifetime, they were first published in 1982 in a vocal score arranged by Colin Matthews from the soprano-and- orchestra original. The first of the two Hugo songs in the set, Nuits de juin (from Les Rayons et les ombres) is obviously overwritten but, for a mere prep-schoolboy, what overwriting! He had been studying with Frank Bridge for only a year by this time but the impressionistic means by which he attempts to capture the sensual reverberations of the poem - as though aware of Hugo’s description of music as “the vapour of art” - are astonishingly sophisticated. L’Enfance (from Les Contemplations) is more prophetic of the later composer, not so much in its sound as in its subject matter and its imagery. With its mingling of childhood and adult experience, the latter represented by snatches of French folk song, it is a clear anticipation of At the Railway Station (or The Convict and Boy with the Violin) in Winter Words.

If a claim could be made for anyone as Hugo’s composer it would be Saint-Saëns. He set only twenty of his poems, which scarcely makes him Hugo’s equivalent of Mörike’s Wolf, but they were written over a long period in his life and represent as much as a third of his total song output. His enthusiasm having been aroused by a handsomely bound collection of Hugo poems given to him in his youth, he acquired every new volume as it was published and never lost interest his musician’s interest in them. Even during the time in the middle of his career when he wrote few songs of any kind he fashioned choruses on Hugo poems, composed his symphonic poem Le Rouet d’Omphale after a poem in Les Contemplations, and contributed to a campaign to erect a statue to the poet with his Hymne à Victor Hugo in 1881. He is one of the few composers, moreover, to have set a poem (Chant de ceux qui s’en vont sur mer) from the politically unsafe Les Châtiments when Hugo was still in exile.

The affinity between poet and composer is no better illustrated than by the earliest of the songs in this group, Soirée en mer (from Les voix intérieures), which is an apparently spontaneous and yet broadly conceived outpouring of vocal melody over a suitably undulating piano accompaniment. In comparison with that À quoi bon entendre seems no more than a salon charmer. In fact, its light rhythms, flexible vocal line and easy harmonies, which are artfully recalled in the little piano postlude, are perfectly adjusted to the not very great weight of words taken from a serenade in Ruy Blas.

La Coccinelle is a delightfully playful setting of another light-hearted poem (from Les Contemplations) - basically a pun on the French term for ladybird, “Bête au bon Dieu” - its piano part briefly anticipating insect songs by Chabrier and Ravel, its vocal line resorting to parody at the end. One of the most intriguing of all Hugo poems, Si vous n’avez rien à me dire (also from Les Contemplations) is set here with masterfully understated sentiment. The modest change of harmony for the second stanza, the quickly suppressed access of passion in the third and the quietly melodious piano interludes are all the more poignant for the prevailing simplicity.

Among Hugo’s foreign composers Maude Valérie White is not the most celebrated. She should, however, be spared the oblivion to which so many of the song composers among her English contemporaries, particularly the women among them, have long been consigned. Her Chantez, chantez, jeune fille inspirée is not a drawing-room ballad but a stylish French song with a true melodic élan and an engaging piano ritornello anticipating and echoing the first phrase of the vocal line. Her unpretentious treatment of the text should be effective too in offsetting Liszt’s application of the full romantic apparatus in the three songs that follow.

Liszt got to know Hugo during the years he spent in Paris in the 1830s and found a kindred spirit in a poet of prodigious creativity, extraordinary virtuosity and inexhaustible romantic fervour. He was inspired by Hugo in several ways, not least in the two symphonic poems, Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne and Mazeppa (based on poems in Les Feuilles d’automne and Les Orientales respectively). The six Hugo songs, which date mainly from the early 1840s, are necessarily less sensational but, particularly in the later revisions, they display a remarkable affinity of temperament between the music and the words. While they might seem unduly self-conscious in comparison with, say, the most inspired of the Saint-Saëns settings, they are no less authentic Hugo for that.

While Liszt liked to introduce plenty of colour variety into his songs he went only so far as the words gave him legitimate encouragement. Enfant, si j’étais roi (from Feuilles d’automne) with its splendid regal gestures in the first stanza and its ominous rumblings from the underworld in the second, is an extreme but irresistibly effective example. Comment, disaient-ils (Hugo’s Autre Guitare) he set as a miniature Spanish scena, colouring the piano part with simulated guitar figuration, just as Lalo and Bizet were to do, but making more of a drama out of it than either of his successors. Oh! quand je dors is also more dramatic than Lalo’s version and, with its vocal cadenza in the middle, more overtly artful. But as a setting of a poem that is not too modest to allude to Petrarch - a literary idol for both Hugo and Liszt - it is scarcely more exaggerated in expression than is appropriate to the text.